Thursday, April 26, 2007

CCAD Women in Animation: Part 6

Links and notes from Sari Gennis: 4:30 PM, 4/14/07

Among her influences, Sari Gennis counts her friend, John Kricfalusi (whose blog is a great wealth of animation knowledge and wisdom). She also counts among her influences Winsor McKay and Muybridge. (I forget if she was the lecturer that also mentioned R. Crumb.)

She mentioned the term Trackback, for which I can find no definition, and that is probably why I wrote it down.

She studied at RISD and was a member of the NYIT Computer Graphics Laboratory and MIT's Architecture Machine Group (predecessor to the awesomely cool MIT Media Lab.) She worked with NYIT Computer Graphics Lab founder and general captain of the computer animation industry Ed Catmull.

She showed a still or two from The Works (~1980), which was started at NYIT. It was to be the first computer animated feature, but it was never finished.

She won the first Emmy for a computer animated piece.

She mentioned the vintage computer graphics book Creative Computer Graphics. I think she had something to do with the CG head on the cover. My memory is really bad and my notes are even worse (if you can belive that).

She worked on the Kraftwerk music video, "Musique Non Stop".

She talked about and showed some video captures from Bush Soul, an interactive CG installation.

There was some time left after Vita Blackburn's lecture, there was some time left over so there was a screening of the Dan Lund documentary Dream On Silly Dreamer, about the demise of classic animation produced by Disney Feature Animation.

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Links and notes from Recruiter Presentations: 1:00 PM, 4/15/07

Animation and VFX talent agent Rachelle Lewis talked about jobs in animation. She gave a handout of the various job types available. One of her clients that she mentioned in particular was John (Jack) Kasprzack.

I think it was her that mentioned Peter de Sève and his cool sketchbook for sale.

The next speaker was Blue Sky storyboard artist Karen Disher. She was an original character designer and director for the TV series Daria. She talked about acting, gags, and plusing the script. She mentioned how the singing vultures in Ice Age: The Meltdown replaced a scene with talking reptiles (the bad guys), because that scene was not working. I think it was a change for the better. She showed lots of story boards and styles from Blue Sky artists. She said that in boards and concepts, you have to draw clear, not clean. You have to get the point across. She mentioned Patrick Smith, and independent film maker. She also mentioned that there are summer internships at Blue Sky for PAs.